229: No Such Thing As The Great Modesto

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dad Shriver and I'm sitting here with Andrew Hudson-Murray, James Harkin, and Alex Bell.

And once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you Alex My fact this week is that the Swiss flush about two million dollars worth of gold down the toilet every year are they hiding it because it's Nazi gold and they're embarrassed about the fact they have it I haven't time to mention the Nazis three seconds

no this is lots and lots of little tiny, tiny gold particles.

It's a sort of waste result of the manufacturing process of watches, they think.

They're not entirely sure where it comes from.

All they know is that they've been analysing the content of sewage, and it's got a really weirdly high percentage of gold in it.

Can they collect it?

They're trying to come up with a way of getting it that's cost-effective, but at the moment it's too expensive.

How crazy that it's costing too much to get 1.8 million

watches worth of gold.

Except that when you think it like it's like tiny, tiny particles in the water, so you know it's like panning for gold.

Can you go panning for

gold there?

I think they're way too small.

It's not like panning for gold in like old times where you had little nuggets so you outreached.

If you have the choice of panning for gold in a nice river in Scotland or maybe in a load of sewage in Switzerland, I know which one I'd choose.

Yeah, but one definitely has gold in it.

One's got $1.8 million worth of gold.

There's gold in the mountains in Scotland, is there?

Did you not see that?

That was in the news about two weeks ago, maybe a week ago, where they found the largest gold nugget ever in Britain, I think.

Oh, the guy who was sitting in the river.

I think what he does is he lies down face down in the water and he just kind of looks for it.

Like, he doesn't do that panning thing or whatever.

He just kind of lies there and waits and just tries to see it.

It's nice, because it's like fishing, but without the

fish.

Yeah, you just...

And you are the fish in a way.

You're in the water.

In a way.

Do we know...

Are you allowed to keep it if you find a big gold nugget in a river?

I can't remember.

I think what happens is the Crown Estates can claim it.

The Queen's allowed to eat it.

Is it if you find it on Crown Estate land, or is it just the Queen?

I think the Queen owns everything, actually.

Oh, man.

If you find it downstairs in the...

You know, let's say you're rooting around in the toilets of the QI office.

And there's no reason to say that.

And I don't know why you would look at me when you're saying that.

Well, I'm just saying, like, we've already decided that that's a good place to find gold.

There are no rivers around here.

Right.

But if you did find some gold, then technically I think you'd have to offer it to the Queen.

Really?

I think so.

Unfair.

I think the same goes for bottle tops if you find them in a metal attached.

She's just less interested.

It's a crown made of bottle tops, isn't it?

It's quite that all these rooms at Buckingham Palace are just full of old bottle tops.

Do you know there's loads of gold in British sewers as well, but it's not from, because we don't have a luxury watch industry the same way that the Swiss do.

It's about seven parts per million, which would make it economically feasible as a gold mine, as in a gold mine you get less than that.

yeah but the way you get it gets into the water in britain is from people doing the washing up while wearing wedding rings so tiny bits of gold and also get this if you brush your teeth and you've got a gold tooth yeah tiny bits of gold will come off and make their way into the water

how often would i have to do the washing up before my wedding ring completely disappeared from my hand it sounds like you you're really hoping to get out of something by doing the washing up i can say to my wife i can't do the washing up because then our marriage will be annulled.

Probably several hundred years, I'm afraid.

Okay, I think that's a good idea.

Divorce and subsequent loss of the wedding ring would happen much sooner as a result.

We've got in our upcoming book, we've got an article on the fat burg that was displayed in the London Museum this year.

What is that book then?

It's going to be called The Book of the Year 2018.

Okay, and where is it going to be available?

You know, places like Waterstones and online retailers that Andy doesn't allow us to say anymore.

And

I do.

It's going to be on Amazon.

No, you can't say that.

Sorry, you were saying?

Yeah, so the fat berg, for anyone that doesn't know, is just a giant lump of fat that they find in the sewers, mainly of London, but they've been found worldwide.

And

yeah, they're ginormous.

It takes them days and days, in some cases weeks, to absolutely knock them apart.

They have to use pneumatic drills to get them down.

And it was made up 90% of cooking fat that we put down our drains.

The others are wet wipes, which is all down to, it turns out, Colonel Sanders and KFC.

KFC effectively were the first people to let the wet wipe out into the public.

Yeah, the man who invented the wet wipe sold it to KFC.

So KFC were the original wet wipe people.

But now they're mostly used by parents and stuff, right?

Exactly for children's bums.

Yeah.

They weren't used to wipe the chickens, were they?

But yeah, what's interesting as well is that they found a higher concentration of banned gym supplements in the fatberg than they did, say, cocaine or MDMA.

What, like steroids and things.

Yeah, exactly.

So the fatberg might become Musselberg.

That's a German city I want to go to sometime.

All German cities are Musselberg.

Yeah.

Very well-developed people.

So I found a crime from this year where thieves used sewage to steal gold.

This is clever.

So it's in Western Australia where there are lots of gold mines.

And what they did is they stole a sewage truck.

And you remember sewage trucks, they have those big hoses and nozzles which they can suck up sewage with.

And they stuck that into a gold mine site's big pit of gold-rich liquid and they suck that all up.

Interesting.

I didn't know that was refined.

I didn't know they would have like gold-rich liquid.

I don't know how the mining process works.

I guess maybe if they're blasting, it was equal, and they sort of had this goldy soup, which they could then refine.

And if you're going to leave that lying around in a big vat labelled gold-rich liquid, you're asking to be robbed, really, aren't you?

That's like putting it in a sort of bag with a dollar sign on it.

It's very impressive though to steal a sewage truck to think of that because I would have just gone along with a Henry Hoover and tried to take a little bit.

I think that would be the

great escape level way of doing it, going in as a cleaner every day and just like getting a little bit in your Hoover.

The largest nugget of gold ever found was called Welcome Stranger.

Okay, and I say was because as soon as it was found it was melted down into gold ingots.

The second largest was called Welcome, only welcome, and that was also melted down into sovereigns.

But the good thing about that is it was found by one guy with a pickaxe who carried on mining after his fellow miners had gone to lunch.

So they all went away and he thought, I'm going to carry on mining.

And as soon as he saw the nugget, he fainted.

And then when the guys came back from lunch, they saw he was kind of face down in the middle of the hole and they thought he was dead.

And so they climbed down to try and save him and they saw the nugget and they fainted as well.

Wow.

God, so it turns out the way to find nuggets of gold is just to lay face down.

That's true.

Why were they called Welcome and Welcome Stranger?

That's quite weird names for nuggets.

Well, that's a really good question.

I don't know why they're called that.

I suppose what you might say,

if you found a nugget, you might, oh, Welcome Stranger.

Yeah, that's a quite

oddly predatory way of discovering something.

The third largest is the largest extant nugget.

It's called the Hand of Faith, and it's on display in Las Vegas.

Do you know what the Netherlands are doing with their old toilet paper?

With their old toilet paper.

Yeah, used toilet paper.

They're making it into windmills.

Shitty windmills.

Oh, I wish it was that.

No, well, they're turning it into bike lanes.

So it is a similarly green.

It was a similarly kind of stereotypical Dutch thing.

Do they collect their paper on the side and not flush it down?

Is that why?

Oh, I don't know how it's collected, actually.

That's a really good point.

It must be that it's flushed down and then sort of scooped out and not really bi-digressed.

I think it's scooped out.

Because what they do, once they've got it, I don't know how they get it, but they they extract the cellulose from it.

So, you know, it's tree pulp and stuff, which has a lot of cellulose, which is this tough fibre.

Then they sterilize it, obviously, and then they turn it into big pellets, which they can turn into asphalt.

But also, bike lanes are usually coloured brown, aren't they, to make them look different to the rest of the road?

Right.

So they probably don't have to use any colouring.

Yeah.

A lot of skid marks as well.

All the breaking of the bikes, guys.

Watch out for podestrians.

Oh, God.

Dear me.

And yeah, I'm almost certain that they are, they must be flushing them when they're closing the sewers because it's not like they'd be saying, please, everyone, put aside your used toilet paper and we'll come and get them.

No, no, it does.

That does happen, Alex.

That does happen.

Yes, it does.

It does be like in the Netherlands.

It happens in Greece.

Yeah, it happens in Greece.

Really?

Yeah.

I don't remember that song.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that Robert Burns made his own ink out of of old beer, lard, elephant tusk, and sulfuric acid.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's very cool.

What a man.

I read the source that you sent to this, and it noted that these were all things that were readily available in Scotland at the time.

Yeah, I mean, old beer and lard, obviously.

But where did they get elephant tusks in Scotland?

Ivory, I reckon.

Big ivory trade.

Sure.

Yeah.

I mean, that's...

I just said another word for the thing that you said.

Capitalism, I guess.

Yeah, so I didn't know this, but writers basically had to make their own ink for centuries.

You couldn't just go down to the ink shop and buy some ink.

So there are all these recipes around, and researchers from the University of Glasgow have analysed, it's really cool, they took original Burns poems and they lifted ink away in a way that didn't damage the original poems.

Wow.

Because obviously the original manuscripts.

That's amazing.

I wonder how they do that.

I don't know.

I wish I did.

Because you wouldn't want to accidentally lift off a whole word.

No.

And you forget what it is.

And the really cool thing is, they've found different recipes from different stages of his life.

So when he was young and poor, he used a particular kind of iron gall ink.

And then as he got richer, he used this thing called ivory black, which involved treacle and lard and acid and vinegar and ivory.

And it's a way of telling the real poems from forgeries.

Yeah, which that's amazing, isn't it?

They're starting to apply this now to all ancient manuscripts because if they see the recipe someone uses and then someone else claims to have an original and it turns out it's made from i don't know mole and

butter and sausages then it's like this is not

mole sorry mole as it the animal yeah the animal yeah and moles human moles

butter and sausages yeah yeah um robert burns uh used to have some really cool nicknames go on he used to refer to himself as spunky oh yeah yeah uh he used to call himself the ranton roven robin That was one of his personal favourites, apparently.

But he never called himself Rabbi or Robbie, which is what Rabbi Burns or Robbie Burns is what many people in the UK would associate as his nickname that we've given him.

Yeah, never called himself that.

But he's calling himself these.

He's not really a nickname.

Yeah, they're not really nicknames if you call them yourself.

Bit of a deal.

No one else has calling him Spunky.

I don't think that counts as a nickname.

That's more like an online avatar.

Just a Twitter handle at Ranton Rovenrollins.

Oh,

he would have been great on Twitter.

Would it be funny, I think.

Woody already at you just retweeting really tedious things about making your own ink.

Yeah.

Yeah,

these recipes are really weird.

So there are lots of recipes that used to exist.

Oh, do you know about gall ink?

No.

Cystrix pickles.

Gall.

Ah, sorry, do you know?

Gall as in gallbladder, I guess.

Yes, but not as in gallbladder.

Gall wasps?

Exactly.

Yeah, so there are hundreds of species of wasps called gall wasps.

And what they do is they

land on an oak tree and they lay their eggs inside the leaf buds.

And then that turns into this weird kind of tumour or lump on the tree and the little grub grows inside and it's all protected from the outside.

But those galls can be ground up and they're a massive ingredient for ink and they were for hundreds and hundreds of years.

There's only one kind of oak gall which makes the ink and it's basically the most important wasp in history.

So all of, you know, Mozart, Darwin, Magna Carta, Beowulf, all of that was written in oak gall ink.

Wow.

It was for centuries and centuries it was the ink to use.

But you could say that these wasps are responsible for all those great works, can't you, really?

I think you can.

Yeah.

Yep.

Wow.

I mean, also the trees that you made the paper from and, you know, the tables.

It's a group effort, yeah.

To collaborate on that.

This logic is flawed.

But, you know, well done, wasps.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not going to be like a hidden figures movie, is it?

I recognize NASA.

What do we make it out of these days, then?

I don't actually know much about.

I don't know, actually.

I think it involves carbon but I haven't looked it up properly is it not made out of moles and sausages some butter I think yeah yeah

I don't know it's probably made out of some kind of synthetic resin stuff yeah let's go with that cool colour

capitalism

did you know that the secret service has an international ink library no and they keep more than 11,000 specimens of ink and it's for identifying mystery inks when they get you know like a poison pen letter or something like that.

They've got inks dating all.

So it was set up in this.

So, what does that do for them?

Or they can find out

when or where it was made.

Turns out we're looking for the author of Beowulf.

Bring in the wasp.

But yeah, they've got inks dating back always to the 1920s, and it's pretty cool.

So, blood's used often in place of ink.

I was just looking into different types of methods of robots.

Wait, where, where?

So didn't Saddam Hussein have a Quran in his own blood?

This is what I was going to say.

No, no, but it's extraordinary.

I'd not heard of this.

So Saddam Hussein post a assassination attempt on his son, became a devout Muslim.

And so I read this in Atlas Obscura.

He gave,

after his 60th birthday, 27 liters of his own blood to a calligrapher.

He must have needed a a big biscuit after that.

So he gave it to this calligrapher who spent two years putting together a 600-page blood, Saddam Hussein blood-inked Quran, which is now locked in a vault in a mosque in Baghdad.

But it sits there.

It's this bizarre

thing.

I mean

there's much more blood than you would need to make a new Saddam Hussein there.

You need more than blood to make a person earned.

That's true, yeah.

No?

I'm just saying if someone else finds other ingredients than what's they're doing.

I've watched Jurassic Park, and I'm pretty sure they only had some blood.

That's very true, actually.

Yeah, but then the problem is that the dinosaurs turned female, so at some point, Siddhamataine might turn into a girl and start reproducing on the island.

Yeah, but I'll assume we're keeping him on.

I don't want to go to the theme park all see the film, to be honest.

I think it's a more sensible pitch than the new Jurassic World movie.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Sweden's highest point is now its second highest after the top of it melted.

Oh no.

Poor, poor highest point.

Or good for the second highest point.

Yeah, that's true.

Finally, that bastard's got what's coming to it.

So

is the second highest one not covered in ice?

So, you're right, exactly right.

So they're basically the same part, they're the same mountain, but they're two different peaks on the same mountain.

And the highest point in Sweden has a glacier on top of it but due to the recent heat wave the glacier has melted and now the second highest point is the highest but in the winter they expect them to swap places again yeah so it must be really confusing for any sort of textbooks that they're going to publish between now and winter because they don't know they can't confirm that it's definitely going to get cold enough the real victims in this scenario

and this is i'll probably pronounce this wrong but it's something like kebner kaiser mountain which is in the north of sweden oh man man.

So it's not a good news story in some ways.

Well, I didn't put it forward as a good news story.

No, no, no, completely.

No, you didn't.

I think it's just a thing that happened.

And I think it's interesting that a country can have two peaks that are the highest at different points of the area.

And there are even worse things about it, actually, because let's say you're Swedish, or let's say you're any nationality, but you want to climb the highest point in Sweden.

You've always been able to climb this kind of point, which is the north peak of Kebner Kaiser.

and now you need to climb the other one and actually it's a much more difficult climb so for a safety aspect they think a lot more people might get injured or killed because they're trying to climb this really difficult peak whereas before they could do the relatively easy one.

Can you wait until I guess you can wait until winter?

Oh no it's bad climbing mountains in winter isn't it?

It's easier in spring and summer.

Yeah although it's snowy at the top anyway of the of the old one.

How much is it melted by to make it?

Is it a mash of sand?

Because you could just take like a Calipo up if you really want the other one to be fine and just stick it in the snow.

I don't think you're allowed to make your own highest point.

Well, that did happen.

That's that movie.

I think we might have mentioned it before, The Man Who Went Up the Hill and Came Down the Mountain, which was a true story of the guy in Wales who

they said that to be a mountain it had to be a certain height, so he added a little bit on top of it to make it higher.

But I think he did that with ground rather than Calippos.

I didn't actually I thought that movie was going to be something sort of some tedious emotional journey and that was a metaphor.

I didn't realize that was literally the story.

I think it might also be a tedious emotional journey.

I think it was.

Okay, so get this.

The lowest, highest point.

No, hang on, sorry.

Here we go.

Oh, damn it.

The highest, lowest point in the world

in any country.

Oh, okay.

So

can I guess?

Yeah.

I think it is in Swaziland.

Oh, you're so close.

Oh, it's down there somewhere, isn't it?

The other one.

Lesotho.

Lesotho.

It's the other small country within South Africa.

Is Lesotho the enclave country?

Yes.

Which is completely surrounded by South Africa.

Okay.

What is it?

Is it like a cave or is it above ground?

Yeah, it's just the lowest.

So all of Lesotho is well over a thousand meters above sea level.

So the lowest point in Lesotho is 1,400 meters above sea level, and everything else is even higher than that.

Are there any countries that are entirely below that point?

Oh, well,

Tuvalu.

Tuvalu, yeah, all of those places that are going to get Tuvalu and the Maldives, yeah.

So the lowest high point, as opposed to the highest low point, the lowest high point is in the Maldives, which is 2.4 meters above sea level.

Yeah.

So Maldives, obviously, lots of islands, and 99% of the Maldive territory is open ocean.

But there was this island called Vilingali, which had an eight-foot rise on it, which was the highest point.

However, in 2013, a golf course opened on that island, and it has a small mound on it, which was 16 feet above sea level.

And the fifth hole teeing off point is the highest point now in the Maldives.

And it's in a resort, and they do a daily tour and all guests who complete the ascent get a certificate.

Wow.

That's hilarious.

That's be annoying though if you're playing golf and you've got a whole sort of expedition trying to what with crowns on

helmets and with mount the hole.

And there's a flag there.

Someone's got a hero.

I've got a Swedish mountains fact.

Oh yeah.

There is a massive bunker inside.

Is this another golf fact?

No.

So there's a sort of massive massive underground bunker inside the Swedish mountains, and it was built as a sort of government protection facility for nuclear events and stuff.

And it's no longer used for that.

And it was sold to a private data centre.

So they keep servers in there now.

And one of the things that's kept inside those servers is WikiLeaks.

Huh?

Assange?

Yeah, actually,

the digital version of Assange was just kept

imprisoned in underground.

And you look at pictures, it does actually look like an evil villain's lair.

It's crazy.

But it's inside a mountain.

It's made of glass.

But it's cool.

Yeah, that's where Wikileaks is, guys.

It's inside a Swedish mountain.

Wow.

That's very cool.

That is very cool.

The highest point in the Netherlands is 4,000 miles from Amsterdam.

What?

Yeah.

So there's the Caribbean Netherlands, which is a different Antilles.

Yeah, I think it was called the Dutch Antilles.

And then recently they had a weird admin change.

But there's an island called Saba, and it has a mount on it called Mount Scenery.

It's about three or four times higher than anywhere in the Netherlands.

That's true, actually.

if the highest point of Britain I think if we count everything that we claim is in the Antarctic

because we claim a little bit of the Antarctic which has a massive mountain on it.

Nice.

And the highest point in Australia is not what is called Kosiosco.

Yeah it's actually an island off the coast of Australia which has got a massive peak on it.

And the highest point in Spain is in the Canary Islands, Mount Tiede.

So loads of countries, the highest point isn't really in that country at all.

Wow.

Who owns...

I no.

I was thinking the moon with the highest with the highest.

No one owns the moon.

No, but there's the flag.

That's not true.

I've got a certificate.

The highest point of Andy's house is actually on the moon.

I have a thing or two about the big heat wave that we've been going through.

So this is quite tied in, your fact, to the fact that globally there's been a heat wave.

And Ireland, very recently,

through the heat wave and through the drought, has had exposed a sort of huge stone that says IR.

So E-I-R-E.

Sorry, I always pronounce that error, but I don't know.

Error.

I don't know how to pronounce it.

Yeah, would you say error?

Don't look at me.

Would you say error?

I don't know.

I'd say it is an error.

To say what?

I think it is error.

Error, I'll just say that.

So it's exposed this giant stone, error, E-I-R-E, and it's along the Irish coast and what it was is during the Second World War they built this

to show the enemies that were flying over thinking that they were gonna bomb let's say England don't bomb us this is Ireland this is neutral ground this isn't it to differentiate Ireland from Northern Ireland

and then I think well I'm just guessing but I would have thought that pilots would know whether they were over Ireland or it could be foggy you know if you're flying second world board they

sound bad you're just assuming everyone in the water was an idiot it just sounds like like someone who's used the excuse of fog for making some pretty egregious errors in your life.

I wasn't mean to be in her house.

You know, I didn't know I was 50 miles away.

It was foggy.

Foggy.

What can I say?

Sorry, just to backtrack a tiny bit.

There were huge fires as a result of this heat wave, and the fires knocked out all of the grass and the trees and so on.

And it's exposed this giant air, E-I-R-E, to mean Ireland.

I've found it on the internet, so let's see how they pronounce it.

Air or era.

Brilliant.

So it's that porn hub that you have to find like

I have a fact about Sweden which I definitely know how to pronounce.

So in lots of Swedish mountains there have been no worms since the ice age.

They were all wiped out.

It's true.

Yeah, it's great.

I mean bad for the worms.

Bad for the worms but they've got other places to live so it's fine.

And bad for the soil in the mountains.

This is the thing.

So they change the vegetation and they have very negative effects on particular trees.

I think they even affect deer life cycles.

I can't remember how.

So the thing is that they are definitely invasive because worm populations apparently are only capable of moving five to ten meters a year.

So for them to make their way all the way through northern Europe into the Swedish mountains, they wouldn't have done it for thousands of deaths.

It's not much of an invasion.

It's not like the Germans going into Russia, is it?

No.

And so this is how we know that they're invasive.

And they're impossible to get rid of if they establish themselves.

so this could completely change the european landscape over the next few hundred years yeah um do you know that with due to the heat wave um bears in dundee in the zoo um got an 80 kilo ice lolly to keep them cool

wow what's it made of uh ice oh nice and fruit oh lovely that's very nice that does sound good it sounds like one of those decoy healthy lollies

yeah like when the um ice cream man used to come and we weren't allowed to go and my mum would instead freeze some orange juice and we had to have that

wedding.

Would she then cut the carton open?

As in, how would you get at the orange juice?

Did you pour it into a glass?

You do it in ice cube trays, right?

No, so we had special ice lolly trays that are like ice cube trays but shaped like ice lolly.

I remember those.

So you pour the yeah into the molds.

That is a better method than just freezing the ice cube

cube juice carton and then hacking it open.

An entire litre of ice orange juice.

What you do do is you jam a pool cue into the orange juice castard and you freeze that.

Did the bears get like get it on sticks?

I saw a photo of it, I think, and I think it was hanging on a chain.

Wow.

And they could climb on it.

That is

on an ice lolly.

Imagine a magnum, a big magnum swinging from a chain.

And you can just climb from it.

Very grippable.

An ice lolly is a solid block of ice.

I think I've just discovered my fetish.

I would love to see that Miley Cyrus video where she swings in the mind.

And the highest temperature ever recorded in Scotland was

this year, but it was declared invalid because the thermometer was next to a vehicle with its engine running.

And

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that when financier William C.

Rolston modestly refused to allow a town to be named after him, the town instead called itself Modesto.

Modesto or Modesto?

I'd say Modesto.

Modesto.

I will guess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Modesto.

Modesto.

Modesto.

Modesto.

Okay.

Yeah.

Modesto.

It sounds like a very demure magician.

It does.

The great Modesto.

Well, I wouldn't say great.

Very good.

But yeah, so this fact was sent to me by at Shutter underscore Butter on Twitter.

It's an amazing fact, so thank you, Shutter underscore Butter.

And so Modesto is in California.

It is a town that has had a bit of fame via the fact that it's the birthplace of George Lucas and back in the day he made a very famous movie called American Graffiti.

It was a puck.

It was a massive movie at the time.

I was pre-Star Wars.

It sounds like that's what he's going to do.

But I think what you're going to say is that might have been based on this town.

It was.

American Graffiti took place in Modesto.

It was filmed elsewhere, but that's where it took place.

Interestingly, George Lucas is so modest that he only introduces himself as the director of American Graffiti.

Jeremy Renner, the actor, is from Modesto.

He was born there as well.

This is a significant town.

It is.

And can I just quickly slip in my favorite Jeremy Renner fact from the year?

Just used it.

Thank God he was born there.

I've been trying to get this fact out.

He's starring in the new movie Tag.

Right.

So in Tag,

it's only most of Jeremy Renner that appears in the movie.

His arms don't appear in the movie.

And the reason is he broke them just as they were filming.

And and so they were in casts, and so they had to CGI in his arms.

Yeah, so when you watch the movie, tag, which is predominantly about, I think, using your arm tag, yeah, they're not his arms, they're CGI arms.

Are you saying he was running around with two broken arms in casts?

Yeah,

does that mean technically he's still it?

Because he hasn't tagged them.

It's also a really confusing conversation to have.

We're going to recast his arms because he's been broken.

Get the casting director in here.

Very good.

So, so on this town's naming thing,

there's a huge trope of how towns get their name.

So there's a town in Tennessee which is called Difficult.

And

it all happens when they write to the post office saying, can we have this particular name?

And supposedly when they applied for the name, which was a really complicated name, they wanted to name the town.

The U.S.

Postal Service replied, Your name is difficult.

And the people in the town thought, oh, they've just renamed our town, difficult.

I never believe any of these stories.

There's one in California called Likely, and the legend is always that all the residents got together to decide on a name for their new town because, for some reason, they were all living there in a town with no name.

And then they were like, oh, we're never going to grunt on a name.

And a guy went, yeah, likely.

And then they were like, great name.

And the same happened for town You Bet.

Apparently, there's a guy who went, oh, you bet, and that's why the town's called You Bet.

Ridiculous.

I mean, like, they all like all of this stuff is on the internet.

They need to get more original stories.

Yeah.

Ding-dong, Texas.

Do you know about that?

Ding-dong, Texas.

Would just somebody ring the bell just as they were deciding on the name.

And they're like, perfect.

No, it was named after

Governor Peter Bell

and the businessman Zulus Bell and his nephew Bert, but Zulus and Bert were not in any way related to Peter.

So yeah, it was called Ding Dong as a reference.

And weirdly, it's in central Texas's Bell County.

Ding dong.

I thought it might have been named after Leslie Phillips.

Oh,

Ding Dong.

Yeah.

Plast of the past.

There's only one place on Earth that I've found which is called Earth.

Oh, okay.

It's in Texas.

That's good.

And there are various reasons as to why, as always,

somebody suggested it's because they have a lot of Earth there.

But there's a really good article about it online which points out there are at least two other places in America named after every single other planet, Venus and Mercury.

Famously in Florida.

Jupiter, there are Saturn's.

Guess which planet there are not two places named after?

Mercury.

It's Uranus.

There is one place, but it's more of a tourist attraction than a town like it's the little tourist attraction which contains the uranus brewing company combat uranus there's a guy who calls himself the mayor of uranus they sell fudge which has a label on it saying uranus fudge is great um this is a cool place there's a place called nitro which is named after the explosive powder which was made there in the first world war that's so cool that seems like a proper etymology there's a place in um russia called asbestos where a friend of mine was born wow and it's where they make all the asbestos and send it to america very cool This is, uh, I don't know how well this is known in Britain, but uh, in the UK, there was a place that had its name changed, Stains.

Well, it's there's still a place called Stains.

Well, technically, not just Stains, it's now called Stains Upon Thames.

It's not much better, is it?

No, but I remember this.

I remember when they tried to do this.

Yeah, so the reason that they did this is because Ali G internationally had given Stains

exactly such a bad name that

they were always associated if you didn't like I remember watching LEG in Australia and thinking oh Stains must be I could see there was laughter but you just associated it sort of as this place where Stains is quite nice yes exactly

which is quite middle class and quite you know so they wanted to change it but they didn't really change it they just added an extra bit on the end yeah exactly so on the 15th of December 2011

the Speltthorne Borough Council resolved by 25 votes to four

to change the name of the town to Staines upon Thames to try and boost the local economy by promoting its riverside location.

I'm quoting directly from the Wikipedia article

that I found this on.

I wonder if there's a calculation for how much adding upon Thames adds to a town's net worth, as it were.

As in, Richmond upon Thames is quite sort of classic.

Or upon any river.

I do sort of like Stains with Waitrose, and that would probably help.

Yeah, Stains upon Waitrose.

My uncle, when he was a councillor in Bolton, tried to change the name of of Bolton to Bolton-le-Moors.

Yeah, because there are lots of other places called Bolton in the world, and he thought it would distinguish our town from the other ones.

And also, we're on the Moors, as in that's where all the fires went.

It's funny he was trying to bolt on an extra bit of the name.

Very good.

Was he successful?

No, it's still called Bolton.

Surely Bolton is the most famous Bolton.

I don't mean any disrespect to other Boltons around the world, but

oh yeah, Michael.

Famously, people are always getting confused between the town and the person.

And misdirected mail from an entire town to his house every day.

There's a city, Topeka.

We've all heard of Topeka?

So it's in Kansas.

And it's the capital of the state.

It's no, you know, one.

It's no slouch.

It's no slouch.

It's no slough.

But it changed its name to Google for a month.

Did it?

Legally and officially.

Topeka did.

Yeah.

And it was to win a Google high-speed internet project, which would have given everyone internet 100 times faster than the national average.

But then no one would ever be able to search for them online, would they?

If you break the internet, if you Google Google.

Well, it didn't work.

No.

Google went with Kansas City, Kansas, instead.

But the mayor, he said he didn't really mind not winning.

And he said, I've often wondered what difference does it make if it takes you 10 seconds or one second to access information.

My life goes a little slower than that.

Oh, yeah, he's a very lame-back guy.

But this is not the first time they changed the name.

In 1998, Topeka changed its name, and one of you will really like this fact.

They changed it to Topeka Chew

because Pokemon arrived in the USA, yeah.

I love it.

Yeah.

On Modesto.

Yeah.

It's the second unhappiest city in the United States of America.

What?

Yeah.

Wow.

The city's motto is Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health.

And that was selected in a contest in 1911 where the winner won $3 as a prize.

Yeah.

And just to say, Ralston wasn't just this local banker.

Or the man who the town was not named after.

Exactly.

Ralston was...

He was one of the most rich people in California, actually, and he founded the Bank of California.

So he was a very important guy in his day.

Well, he didn't like to talk about it.

I really had to dig deep to find that.

There's a town in California called Secret Town.

Is there?

And why is it called that?

Do we know?

I can't tell you that.

I genuinely know nothing about it.

There's nothing on the Wikipedia page.

It's a two-line Wikipedia page article, isn't it?

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Alex.

At Alex Bell.

That's right.

And you can also go to our group account, at no such thing.

Thing.

Or you can go to our Facebook page, No Such Thingasafish, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have everything up there from our previous episodes to links to our upcoming live shows to our books.

We've got a new book coming out, which you can probably pre-order at this point.

We also have our great documentary series that we put up on iTunes called Behind the Gills.

It's on a few other platforms.

There'll be a link there.

Folllows us around on our last tour of the UK.

You can get it in America, can't you?

Yeah, it's in America now as well, which is very exciting.

If If you're in Modesto, you could probably download it.

No.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.